Challenges and opportunities in the stuffed animal industry

Yangzhou’s stuffed animal industry has a history of more than 40 years of development, and its history has won the reputation of China’s stuffed animal capital. However, for a long time, Yangzhou’s toy manufacturing enterprises have been stuck in the stage of relying on foreign trade orders and competing for the domestic low-end market, forming a common problem in the traditional foreign trade manufacturing industry: lack of independent brands, lack of core technologies, and low product design and development capabilities. Manufacturing technology is backward and so on. These problems have inhibited the ability and even the will of China’s top companies to innovate independently. Dr. Yao Wei, Director of the Department of Information Product Design, School of Software, Zhejiang University, has conducted many investigations on Yangzhou. He believes that the following three prominent problems exist in the stuffed animal industry in Yangzhou:First, the degree of modernization of industry enterprises is low. It is embodied in many aspects such as research and development, production, management, and strategy. A large number of small and medium-sized enterprises are still in the hands-on workshop production and management mode. Although a small number of large-scale enterprises have large-scale production capacity, they are extremely dependent on overseas orders, and they are precarious.Second, the overall awareness of intellectual property rights is weak, including industry and government. At present, plagiarism in the industry is very common. Enterprises have formed this phenomenon for the purpose of profit-seeking, and the government has not formulated relevant laws and regulations for the formation of a fair market environment.The third is the lack of talent strategy. The toy industry is not just about product manufacturing. It actually faces the education of the next generation of human beings and the inheritance of national culture. Companies such as Disney Entertainment Group and Universal Studios in the United States have long recognized this. Many colleges and universities in China can’t even find a few toys. The lack of high-end talents with strategic vision and high-end technology R&D personnel armed with digital technology and intelligent technology have made China’s toy industry at the bottom of the industry chain for a long time.

In response to the above problems, Dr. Yao said that the current stuffed animal manufacturer/industry in Yangzhou is at the threshold of coexistence of challenges and opportunities, and must accelerate the transformation and upgrading of the stuffed animal industry in Yangzhou. Dr. Yao Wei made a suggestion:First, to further strengthen the construction of the industry-university research and development platform, in order to achieve the cultivation of high-quality toy design professionals with creative thinking. Traditional stuffed animal companies must have innovative ideas in order to seek better development. They must follow the path of designing their own brands, change the business philosophy of OEM processing, and enable new design methods and design concepts. In addition, vigorously supporting the development of innovative design institutions can not only break through the bottleneck of current industry development but also provide the most solid intellectual support for the establishment of the national independent innovation system and the construction of Chinese civilization.The second is to improve the digitalization and informatization level of the industry, especially in product development and enterprise management. For example, the figure-soft toy design software developed by Zhejiang University based on knowledge reuse proposes a fast and intelligent design method suitable for the innovative design of small and medium-sized enterprises in small and medium-sized enterprises. Tuyi Software exports two-dimensional patterns by modeling in three-dimensional space. At the same time, the parts library in the design of the figure is a description and description model of related examples. Through the systematic description of the toy design problem and the decomposition of the design object, the feature matching retrieval is used to extract the corresponding knowledge components from the component library, and then the combination of these components can design a new toy 3D model in a short time. , thus avoiding repeated design and greatly improving the efficiency of the design.The third is to effectively strengthen the protection of intellectual property rights and introduce fresh blood for the toy designer industry. Intellectual property protection requires governments and industry associations to formulate rules for industry and national interests, not for corporate interests. At the same time implement strict legal enforcement rules. Supervision can be achieved through market means. In recent years, the toy creative treasure platform can be implemented in accordance with international standards and national standards. The time-honored and punctuality of the country’s only legal time source country is responsible for timing and punctuality, guaranteeing the authority and accuracy of time, and carrying out documents for depositing certificates, in line with the requirements of the electronic signature law for electronic documents as the original form, is legal Electronic evidence of effectiveness. The birth of the toy creative treasure will greatly mobilize the creative enthusiasm of the designers in colleges and other peripheral areas for toy design.The fourth is to cultivate corporate brand creation capabilities and form competitiveness. From the current development of the toy industry, the toy industry does not lack the strength to achieve big brands, and the reason why there is no big brand in the true sense is mainly that industry companies are helpless about how to form valuable brands. This is very common among companies in all walks of life. This is caused by a combination of talents, ideas, methods, and methods. Overseas multinational companies have been away from us for one or two hundred years in this direction. There are many experiences and strategies worthy of our study. There are also many directions and areas that we need to explore and practice ourselves. Different times and different market environments bring us both challenges and opportunities. There is no doubt that this is our era, and success belongs to those who have the courage to change and be brave in innovation.